Le Livre Noire du Communisme on the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933

Chapter for Wolfgang Wippermann et al., Roter Holocaust
Mark B Tauger

 3

 misunderstands Bukharin's point: Bukharin meant that Stalinism did represent a return to harsh tsarist-era policies toward the peasants. Given this general perspective, it seems most likelythat Bukharin would have seen the famine as similar to tsarist-era famines.

3

By "military-feudal exploitation" of the peasantry, Werth means that the regime set grain procurement quotas too high and refused to alter them.

4

In this argument Werth implies a certainindirect intentionality, that the regime did not explicitly setout to impose a famine but imposed high procurement demands thatresulted in famine. Werth does not suggest any reason why theregime might have imposed these quotas so rigidly. The term "military-feudal exploitation" implies economic or securityobjectives, but Werth does not expand on this implication. Werth also does not support his claim about excessive procurement quotas with any information on actual food  production, but rather with inaccurately-cited percentages of theshare of procurements from the harvests (179). For example, heasserts that the procurement plan for 1932 was 32 percent greaterthan that of 1931. His source, however, states (in one sentence)

3

For Bukharin's use of this term at the February 1929 CentralCommittee plenum, see for example R. V. Daniels,

The Conscienceof the Revolution

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), 364.

4

The Soviet regime acquired food supplies from the countrysidein this period (through 1932) by several means, includingcontracts with producers, market exchange, and non-market measures that involved coercion, usually summed up under the term "procurements" [zagotovki]. The regime planned procurements based on projections of agricultural production and of the amountof grain and other food supplies needed for towns, villages, thearmed forces, export, and emergency reserves.

 4

that the Supply Commissar A. I. Mikoian had set a high procurement quota of 29 million tons of grain in early 1932, butthen reduced it in spring of that year to 18 million tons.

5

 Werth thus omits the information that contradicts his argument.The documents show that while officials did consider a highquota in early 1932, the first officially published procurementquota, issued in the well-known 6 May 1932 decree that alsolegalized private trade in grain, was almost 20 percent lowerthan that of 1931.

6

During the subsequent procurement campaign,the regime cut procurement quotas sharply in the regions that had the most difficulty in fulfilling them, including the NorthCaucasus and Ukraine.

7

Werth does not mention these measures,

5

"Mikoyan certainly anticipated no problems at all when, at theend of 1931, he fixed for the next campaign the fabulous targetof 29. 5 million tons; but later, when the situation in thecountryside toward the beginning of the 1932 campaign becameincreasingly alarming, he would have to lower his target forgrain to 18 million tons and to half that for livestock products. " Moshe Lewin, "Taking Grain," in

The Making of theSoviet System 

(New York, 1985), 153. Lewin's statement is notquite accurate; the decision actually was made even earlier, in May 1932, before the procurement campaign began (see below).

6

This law was published in the Soviet press and was seen both by Soviet citizens and foreign observers as a major concession,even a "Neo-NEP;" see Mark Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and theFamine of 19321-1933,"

Slavic Review 

v. 50 no. 1, Spring 1991,71-72. The specific grain procurement quotas were 22.4 milliontons in 1931 and 18. 1 million tons in 1932 for kolkhozy and non-collectivized peasants. Lewin's source is Iu. A. Moshkov,

Zernovaia problema v gody sploshnoi kollektivizatsii

(Moscow:Izd. MGU, 1966) , 201.

7

See for example the decision in the Osobie papki Politbiuroof 17 August 1932 "to accept the proposal of comrade Stalin todecrease grain procurement plan for Ukraine by 40 millions puds[640,000 tons] as an exception for the especially sufferingdistricts of Ukraine," and the follow up decree of 28 August 1932that approved Ukrainian authorities' subdivision of thisreduction by region, RTsKhIDNI 17. 162. 13, sessions of 25 Augustand 1 September 1932. Similar procurement reductions for

 5

even though some of his sources did. In particular, Werthasserts that Molotov rejected local officials' appeals forreduced quotas (183) : according to the archives and Werth'ssources, Molotov did authorize reductions.

8

  Werth's sources, therefore, do not actually support hisargument that the famine was due to "military-feudalexploitation" by rigid procurement quotas.

9

A more completereview of the evidence also challenges Werth's implied argumentthat the regime intended the procurement quotas to cause afamine: by reducing quotas Soviet leaders clearly tried tocompromise between village needs and those from outside (thetowns, the army, and others), an aspect of the situation which Werth does not discuss. Werth also does not examine the size ofthe 1932 harvest, an absolute prerequisite to any evaluation ofthe character of the famine.

10

Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and other regions were introduced infa11 32.8 The Molotov commission to Ukraine in October-November 1932, which the authors discuss, authorized significant reductions in procurement quotas for kolkhozy, sovkhozy, and non-collectivized  peasants, and these plans were broken down by region and immediately telegraphed to local officials; RTsKhIDNI fond 11opis 26 delo 54, II. 193-201, 219-281 (protocols of the Politburoof the Ukrainian Communist Party). For evidence in Werth'ssources, N. A. Ivnitskii,

Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie

 (Moscow, 1994), ch. 3 pt. 3 discusses the reductions in procurement quotas.

9

A related point involves the authors' assertion that theregime exported 18 million quintals (1. 8 million tons) of grainfrom the country in 1933 despite the famine. In fact only afraction of that total, some 300,000 tons, was exported beforethe 1933 harvest. The rest was exported after the famine was forthe most part over, in the second half of 1933 (Tauger, "The 1932Harvest," 88).

10

The importance of harvest size for Russian famines generallyis discussed in Arcadius Kahan, "Natural Calamities and Thei

After the Holodomor: the enduring impact of the great famine on Ukraine

Nationalities Papers, 2015

Mark B Tauger

Publication Date: 2015

Publication Name: Nationalities Papers

BOOK REVIEW

After the Holodomor: the enduring impact of the great famine on Ukraine

, edited by Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda and Halyna Hryn,

 Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies, Cambridge, MA, 

Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, January 2014,

 xxxviii + 283 pp., $29.95 (paperback) ISBN 978-1932650105

The book purports to examine the various ways the Soviet famine of 1931–1933 affected Ukraine. A few of the chapters are valuable contributions, but most of them rehash old and often discredited claims, and its inconsistencies, errors, exaggerations, and omissionswould require a long article to document fully. This review will focus on some of themost important ones.The central argument of the book, and of the research trend it represents, is that theSoviet famine of 1931–1933 was a genocide imposed by Stalin on Ukraine and a fewother regions by means of “grain deliveries”in 1932 to suppress“peasant resistance”and Ukrainian nationalism (xxxvi). The book has eight chapters on the “short-term ”effects of the famine in rural and urban areas and in the North Caucasus region of Kuban’, as well as reports from Poland on the famine, and the famine’s relationship tonationality policies and to the great purges of the later 1930s. Seven chapters on the“long-term ”effects of the famine examine the famine and the Nazi occupation, thepostwar famine, the demographic effects of the famine, the destruction of certain archives,and responses to the famine by Ukrainian leaders and writers and foreign observers.Theauthors disagree over whether thefamine was part ofan“all-[Soviet]Union famine”(10), several regional famines (xvi), or just a Ukrainian famine (most of the authors). Most of the authors consider the“Ukrainian”famine a genocide. One author even claims that people who died in Kazakhstan, the Volga, and elsewhere “were not victims of a genocide (xxxvii). Yet another asserts that there are“no grounds” for considering the “mass repres-sion of citizens of Ukraine”ethnic purges (9). None of the authors discuss these disagree-ments; they mostly write as if they had not read one anothers work.The 1933 famine affected Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Northern Caucasus, the Volga basin, the Central Blackearth Oblast , the Urals, and Western Siberia, and partly other areas, and affected towns as well as villages (Ivnitskii 2009; Liebich 1986). The fact that all of these events occurred in the same period, linked by environmental disasters and bya food rationing system that encompassed more than 40 million people by 1932–1933(Davies 1996), means that the famine was a Soviet famine.The chapter by Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi on famine and the Ukrainian countryside pre-sents a disorganized narrative of the famine with many errors and inconsistencies. For example, he writes that scholars still do not know why the regime imposed the famine(3), but also that the regime resorted to the“weapon of famine”specifically against Ukraine to suppress“mass sabotage” by peasants (3), even while he acknowledges that the famine struck other regions. He also writes that famine served the policy goal of “binding the peasants” to the overall economy (4), and that the threat of famine existedfrom the moment the collective farms were created (6). Yet Kul’chyts’kyi’s ownsources, while indicating some problems in peasants’work in the farms, do not support